Rough-and-tumble action in NFL Blitz '99.

No Gum-Chewing Allowed!

NFL Blitz '99 came with a weird little card reader that was attached to the side of the cabinet. This reader was designed to read Nintendo 64 memory paks. You see, NFL Blitz '99 hit arcades right around the same time that the first Blitz was "coming home." The N64 version of the game contained a slightly scaled-down version of the playmaker that was found in the arcade version. So, if you were really crafty, you could create your plays at home and then take them down to the arcade and upload them into the game.

Here's a dedicated Blitz '99 cabinet. Note the gum-free N64 slot on the right-hand side of the photo.

Of course, the idea didn't really seem to catch on. One fairly large problem with it was that the unit was very susceptible to attacks from angry gum-chewers--even though a sliding metal plate only opened when it was time to read your plays. We've seen more than a few transfer slots ruined by some well-placed spearmint, and, as a result, the concept didn't make its way to any other Midway arcade games.

Jake Plummer's got nothing on this man.

Sports games have typically been a home-game sort of deal. The arcades just weren't cut out for simulations of actual sports. So that's why companies like Midway turned sports games inside out, stripped them down to the bare basics, and made insanely fun representations of professional sports. Midway's NBA Jam basically rewrote the rules for what made a sports game fun, and, after pumping out a few more basketball sequels, the company then turned to football. Even though the series has seen additional sequels since, the '99 installment of the game really marks the high point for the series, as well as for arcade-style sports games in general.

The original NFL Blitz was released in 1997, and it was a stellar game in its own right. It was the second game, NFL Blitz '99, that really perfected the concepts of the first game by providing just enough football for fans of the sport to get into while making a game that was so amazingly playable and easy to learn that anyone could figure out the game's basic concepts almost immediately.

There actually was some depth to NFL Blitz '99 that separated the neophytes from the veterans. The game had a good variety of plays that could be run a ton of different ways, which was sure to keep opponents guessing. This guessing game, of sorts, elevated the game's higher levels of play to a high-speed strategic art form more commonly associated with the fighting genre. Could you possibly mount a defense that could stop all of a play's possible permutations? Could you call your offensive plays in a creative enough way to force a mistake from your opponent? It was also playable by up to four players. While the hardcore Blitz set stuck to one-on-one play, the four-player game offered a much more frantic version of the game that traded in some of the strategic aspects of the two-player game for wild, loose action.

On top of all that, the game contained a play editor. Once you were done with the two pages of default plays, and the hidden third page of plays that were unlocked via a special code, you could attempt to make a killer play of your own. The ability to create your own routes added an even more chaotic level of play to the game. Could the defense possibly stop a play that they weren't familiar with?

The game's fine level of control was also a huge reason for its success, and this is one aspect that has never been faithfully duplicated in any of the home versions of the game. The arcade version of Blitz used a 49-way joystick. It gave you more control than the average eight-way stick, but it didn't get as loose as a pure analog controller would. This tight, responsive control really added a lot to the game, and without it, NFL Blitz never would have been as successful.

NFL Blitz '99 was a game that was amazing fun for players of all skill levels. Once you had an evenly matched player, you could very easily spend hours (and hundreds of dollars, since the game cost a dollar a game--per player) going back and forth, trading wins. It's for all of these reasons that we can induct NFL Blitz '99 into our list of the greatest games of all time--without hesitation.

I have a secret confession to make. I hate football! It's as boring as hell to watch, and most football video games are lame re-creations of a boring sport! But NFL Blitz '99 is different from all that. The game really has a depth to it that rivals the deepest fighting games, and it does it all at an incredibly high speed. That's what made it such an incredible game. You really had to focus to play Blitz properly. You almost had to anticipate what was going to happen a second or two before it actually happened. I got very good at doing just that. There was a time when no day at the GameSpot offices would be complete without at least four or five games of NFL Blitz '99, and, well, I won't say that I'm the best NFL Blitz '99 player in the entire free world, but let's just say that I won a lot more often than I lost.